


live fast

by CloudDreamer



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Aftermath of Day X, Grief/Mourning, Haircuts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, The Shelled One's Pods (Blaseball Team)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-12 23:28:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28518630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: Jessica Telephone comes to terms.
Relationships: Jessica Telephone & Sebastian Telephone
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	live fast

She sits alone on the bathroom counter. 

There’s enough room between the two sinks that she’s not knocking anything over, though it’s an awkward position, and she’s far less poised than she’d prefer to be. Her long hair hangs around her face. It’s so long now. She’d gotten it cut after getting out of that damned shell the first time, but that’d just been a trim. Taking care of the knots that’d developed and evening out the sides. There were chunks torn out on the left, more on that side than the right, and she hadn’t been sure why.

It’d taken hours of sorting out. The time in the barber’s chair had helped her feel remotely human again. She’d showered for hours, letting the cold water wash away the dirt. How had there been dirt inside a peanut shell, she’d wanted to know then? How had the grime accumulated, when the shell was unbreakable? She’d broken her nails a thousand times over, trying to make some sort of indent on the edge the first time. She’d fought so damn hard. 

For hours and hours, she’d tried everything she could, and then she’d tried even more. She’d been so damn alone, the dark had consumed her, and the only sound she could make out was his fucking voice. She can see traces of him in her still. Bits and chunks of his shell stuck in her hair. Patches of her skin are harder than before, and her teeth are harsh. Her voice is raw from all the screaming she couldn’t make heard, and that’s him too. 

Her reflection shows something different than she expects, though.

She doesn’t seem like a feral animal who’d just crawled with blood on her hands out of the jungle. Her hair is still wild but with some sense of design. White crept through it like an infection, the wrong texture coming with the wrong color, and the result hangs loose down half her back. Intentional. The expression her face wants to adopt isn’t fierce, isn’t confident. It’s cruel. She is cruel now. 

Her body is draped in roots that feel like weights. She’s beautifully cold, untouchable, and she hates it. She’s prided herself on being so very touchable for a long time. She has to force the smirk down, the muscle memory of a thousand moments overruled by a single force of will. A force of will that’s gone, that’s _dead_. 

He’s dead.

Everyone heard that terrible scream as the Monitor cracked him right open. She had felt his song tempting her, demand she swing her bat and run like she’d never run before, violently shut off. She’d fallen like a puppet with its marionette strings cut, of course she had. He was the only thing keeping her going. She could’ve laid there forever, had she not been pulled to her feet by someone wearing a Breath Mints uniform. She’s still not sure who that was. She can’t remember any of their names, and she feels like shit about it, but hell, she’s not sure she remembers her own name. The crowd was chanting a name, and she’ll never forget how he sung her cheer 

_“RING, RING.”_

Through her. It was torn from her lips, spit out across the stadium to the watching, waiting fans. Something that was supposed to be just hers and— his.

The brother. 

Her brother. 

Little bell? 

Sebastian Telephone, she knows, because it’s what the crowd cried as the flame spread from his ankles up to his face, a face that was so close to the woman she’d once watched in a mirror very much like this one. Sebastian Telephone is the only name her mind can register, the only name that isn’t buried beneath her skin.

He doesn’t descend. He doesn’t descend again, and he won’t. He can’t.

He’s dead. Ripped to pieces, his power subsumed by another god, and his mantle supplanted. Consumed wholesale, just like everything that makes her whoever she is. The Shelled One is gone, and she is here. Sebastian Telephone is gone, and she is one half of a pair. _Again_ , she is reminded, because some part of her had felt joy to see him walk onto that field. It’d overpowered the wretched horror and disgust that the rest of the Hall Stars had mustered, just for a moment. 

He’d called out to her. What name had he called? 

She doesn’t know how he’d recognized her, then. She barely recognizes herself, even as she is the most extreme parody of herself. Her pride was always a part of the game, it’d never cross the line she’d so callously danced over to his tune. 

_”RING, RING,” her voice says with a mocking sing-song. It echoes in her skull. She leans back, hands gripping the bat as she poses for the audience. Get a good look, she’d have said, because it won’t last when I hit this ball through your skulls._

She hates this, but she can’t change the past. She can’t change the terror the writhes through her body like snakes knotting their tails back and forth. What she can do is cut this perfect ugliness away. Her hands shake as she reaches for the scissors, but they’re strong once she has the blades in her hands. She’s always trembled as she steps up to the plate, before she pulls the bat up. 

Hair that took so painfully long to grow out in the first place falls away with a pleasant ease. She half expects that voice to scream in her skull again, half expects her body to rebel. But no, she’s in control now, and she keeps cutting, shorter and shorter. There: It’s shorter than when she’d first joined the Tigers, a letter dropped at her door before she’d even heard the news of the Return. But that’s not enough. She goes further up, but the length she lands on next is too close to Sebastian’s style, so further. Further. Everything is too much of a reminder.

She settles for something so short that it barely passes her ears. Her college self would’ve been horrified. Part of her expects the new look to set off dysphoria, but no, it’s… fine. 

It’s not fine.It’s good. Jessica lets out a shakey breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She puts down the scissors and reaches up to the mirror, meeting her own hand reflected. There’s something different here, something different than the woman reflected on the big monitors. The woman who looks back at her is not the star, in flight or fallen. She’s something new.


End file.
